Posts Tagged ‘XCOM: Enemy Unknown’

Rarely do I effusively recommend a bundle made up entirely of games I already own, but it’s kinda hard to argue with every BioShock, Spec Ops: The Line, Mafia II, The Darkness II, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown, among others. The Humble 2K Bundle does come with a slight catch (a flat rate of $20 if you want a couple of the more recent games), but even then it’s a formidable deal. Unfortunately, this will technically count as purchasing The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone.

What happy times we live in for fans of old-style X-COM, the way your Gollopmother used to make. The awfully X-COM-y Xenonauts left early access and launched properly only a fortnight ago, and now “open-source clone” OpenXcom has hit version 1.0 after five years of development (“This is your father’s X-COM” goes the tagline in an alternate universe with softer copyright laws).

It’s actually more of a replacement engine for X-COM: UFO Defense, mind, requiring the original game to drop in its data files. As well as improving the interface and fixing old bugs and whatnot, it adds mod support. And with that, you can keep playing new old X-COM for ever and ever and ever.

I am glad. Against all odds, Firaxis’ XCOM revival was actually a great turn-based strategy that captured the spirit of the original Gollop games. It wasn’t entirely bereft of blindspots, though. The art style wasn’t super menacing and didn’t allow imagination to fill in the gaps, the game sort of got easier as time went on, tension dissipated over time, etc. Sometimes, you just need a straight-up remake in order to account for everything. In the case of classic X-Com, that game is Xenonauts. Alec has both written and blathered as much before, and really, is there any greater endorsement? Alec hates everything, even rainbows and my youthful naivete. Someday I’ll earn his approval. Maybe if I become turn-based and prominently feature permadeath, he’ll finally love me too.

“Why am I playing XCOM through for the sixth time?” is a question I’ve asked myself several times over the last week. There are so many other games I should and would like to play, yet I find myself once again knee-deep in something I by this point know every aspect of. One of the answers to that question is that the game just had a belated Android release, so I found my way to it in waiting rooms and bathroom breaks. Much as it’s a surprisingly natural fit for phone play, the combination of camera control issues, not being able to change the colours of my soldiers’ armour and no Enemy Within expansion drew me to firing up the PC version yet again instead.

Only this time, I switched things up, and have had a completely different experience. A rather more Gollopy experience, one might say.Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time Julian Gollop was one of the principle minds behind the original X-Com. Yes, with a dash. A dollop of Gollop’s design wizardry spawned a legendary strategy series, and now – somewhat fittingly, I suppose – he’s making a game about actual wizards. Chaos Reborn is mere days away from casting off its mortal Kickstarter, so Gollop and I are going to play a few rounds of a recent prototype while discussing the ups and downs of running a Kickstarter, the power (and lack thereof) of legacy, what made people fall so madly in love with X-Com, and which of said secret ingredients Chaos Reborn does and doesn’t apply. Expect a heady brew of history and reflection with a powerful note of fuuuuuuture. We’re kicking off at 10 AM PT/6 PM BST.

Update: We’re done! And we ended up roping in a special guest: XCOM: Enemy Unknown lead designer Jake Solomon. What followed were some great Chaos Reborn matches followed by an excellent discussion between two of the brightest minds in the turn-based strategy business. Catch it all below.

13 days and $65,000 to go – that’s the scores on the doors for X-COM creator Julian Gollop’s Kickstarted Chaos remake (which I previewed here). Not a bad situation for the turn-based wizard battler to be in, given it’s already $115k to the good, but a photo finish looks likely. The game’s also up on Greenlight now, so you know what to do if you’re excited about it.

There’ve been eight updates since the project went live a few weeks back, and it’s heartening to see that they primarily focus on explaining features and concepts. Also one of them has a unicorn with a sword for a horn, so big bonus points for that.Read the rest of this entry »

Chaos Reborn is the next game from Julian Gollop, lead creator of the original X-COM: UFO Defense – the greatest videogame of all time. This is a remake of and sequel to Gollop’s earlier, magical duelling game Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. It It takes to Kickstarter today, but unlike other nostalgia-led projects, it’s been in active development for some time already. I played a prototype recently, and I have this to say about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Enemy Within is a proper expansion – like in the olden days – for last year’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, which was a very different reworking of 90s ultro-classic X-COM: UFO Defense. This time around, we get robo-folk and genetic modification, and one giant leap further away from XCOM’s parentage. Good idea/bad idea? Let’s find out!

Saving the world with a big, pink, French cyborg: this perhaps isn’t the XCOM expansion we asked for, but I think it’s the one we needed.Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing unfinished code for major XCOM expansion Enemy Within.Here are some early impressions for you.

XCOM has a confession to make. All this time it’s been carrying on like it’s a militaristic strategy game (albeit with aliens and robots and psychics), but really, really it’s been a superhero game all along. With major expansion Enemy Within, it proudly rips open its shirt, throws its spectacles to the wind and brazenly displays the lurid spandex beneath. My current squad, for instance, is led by a Mexican in a bright pink mech suit, wearing a matching tribly. He can spray flames from his hands. He can leap over small buildings. He can seep healing gas from whatever’s replaced his pores. He is, in short, about as far away as soldiers get from the mopey-looking, meandering dudes in overalls who characterised X-COM.

With Enemy Within, XCOM and X-COM almost entirely part company. While that’s a statement that would have seen 2011 me immediately take my seat in the Angry Tank, here’s why 2013 me is absolutely convinced this accentuated divergence is only a good thing.Read the rest of this entry »

I was away when body-horror XCOM expansion Enemy Within was announced, so that means you’ve tragically been denied my thoughts on it. Clearly, I am outraged that Firaxis are going to pervert their beautiful and unique snowflake with CHANGES and I beseech you to sign my online petition demanding that they cancel months of work immediately and develop a 100% faithful remake of Terror From The Deep instead.

Nah, there isn’t a game I’m more looking forward to right now. I can’t wait to play it. I’m especially enamoured of the idea that now is when they truly make XCOM their own game instead of beholden to its noble origins, and the new soldier-modding stuff sounds fascinating. A smaller added feature is that they’re offering the option to deactivate what’s something of a Firaxis house rule – pre-determined outcomes, regardless of how many times you reload the game.Read the rest of this entry »

XCOM: Enemy Within escalates the alien invasion, introducing body modification, sky-squids and Mechtoids. After seeing the initial reveal at Gamescom, I was eager to try the expansion before release, but when I had the chance last week, I hadn’t expected to see humanity turning on itself. XCOM have encountered a new threat and this one originates much closer to home.

Steam’s free weekend deals used to stretch a good way into Monday for us Brits. Now they seem to stop at 1pm on Sunday for the West coast Americans, which seems very peculiar – surely Sunday afternoon would be the prime free playing time? Still, in the Mother Country that means it stretches until 9pm. And this weekend there’s quite the choice. The absolutely superb XCOM: Enemy Unknown, at 75% off (that’s just £7.50 – cripes), and free to play for the next three days. And there’s Retrovirus, the great six-axis shooter that I bet you never played. Now you can pick it up with 60% off at £6, and also play it for free until Sunday.

I’m fairly sure that this is the most shooty-bangy XCOM trailer that I’ve ever seen. It’s far more energetic and noisy than the videos for the never-born FPS ever managed to be, and if I didn’t know anything about Enemy Unknown, I’d assume this was an advert for some kind of third-person alien-punching game. There’s even a bit at the end that has two mechanical monstrosities punching each other, as if this were Revenge Of The Rise Of The Robots, the sequel that nobody wanted. Has a trailer for a turn-based game of tactics and base-building ever before featured such blatant pandering to the robot fight fan demographic? Not to my knowledge. I’m very much looking forward to playing the expansion, mind.